Street Fight Daily: Groupon Bounces Back, Tablets Replace Registers

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Groupon’s Stock is Up 40% Since Andrew Mason’s Departure (TheNextWeb)
The departure of Andrew Mason will be remembered for its grace, tact, and humor. The company, however, lives on. And following that painful decline in its valuation, it has rebounded more than a little: From the trough, Groupon has risen 40.4 percent.

Topix CEO: Hyperlocal Companies Are ‘Staying the Course’ (Street Fight)
The hyperlocal news and community site has continued to chug along, with its user base growing and traffic spiking during the fall 2012 election season. We recently caught up with the company’s CEO Chris Tolles to talk about how the hyperlocal ecosystem is shaking out, how the shift to mobile is affecting publishers’ CPMs, and how Topix is engaging readers with a more moderated discussion.

With Tablets, Businesses Ring Up at More Fanciful Cash Registers (New York Times)
With the advent of tablets, particularly the iPad, many stores have traded in their clunky cash registers for mobile devices. Now, though, they are dressing up those tablets with inventive accessories to make them both more pleasant to look at and more practical for cashiers.

The Local Marketer’s Guide to Facebook (Street Fight)
Tara Thomas: What steps should local marketers take to maximize the value of their Facebook presence? First, marketers should claim location pages and optimize their presence for Graph Search. Second devise a complementary content strategy for corporate brand pages. Local marketers should also consider using Facebook ads to supplement organic pages content.

Google Places For Business Gets Its Own iPhone App For Managing Listings (SearchEngineLand)
Local business owners have a new tool for managing their Google Places For Business listing: a dedicated app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. What’s not clear is which kinds of local business owners can actually use the app; some are still stuck in the limbo between Google Places and Google+ Local.

The Man Who Made the Cash Register Obsolete (Inc.)
In many ways, Square is building the quintessential technology of a new generation. If the past decade was about the iPad, the iPhone, and other gadgets we hold in our hands, Square’s success suggests the next decade will be about the technology we never see. Instead, we will merely accept, and come to expect, that it’s working all around us. That’s the future Jack Dorsey imagines.

The Separation of “Church and State” in Publishing (PandoDaily)
Bryan Goldberg: In the publishing world, “church and state” is dogma. And, yet, it is a dogma so brainless and idiotic, that the only way it could possibly exist in the modern day is because generations of publishers have brainwashed themselves into accepting it.

Turning a Critical Eye on Yelp (LA Times)
Crowd-sourced reviews may seem like a trustworthy guide to the unknown. But whose opinions are deemed worthy?

Some of this is misleading. The Topix website is NOT more moderated. If anything it has gotten worse. The amount of bullying and racism is at an all-time high. The moderated portion is their sister site, Politix which is a little bit better. The Topix brand, however, it is worse than before.
The growth that the website claims is a little misleading. Five or six years ago, they were averaging about 150,000 comments a day. Today they are averaging about 150,000 comments a day. This despite their refusal to make users register for a valid account which is awful. They added a phone ap and the politix site which factors in the numbers too, yet their comments have not gone up. That means that basically their audience are the same people who were bullying five years ago. Growth isn’t completely accurate.

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